Physicists have discovered a material that superconducts at a temperature significantly warmer than the coldest ever measured on the earth. That should herald a new era of superconductivity research.

The world of superconductivity is in uproar. Last year, Mikhail Eremets and a couple of pals from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, made the extraordinary claim that they had seen hydrogen sulphide superconducting at -70 °C. That’s some 20 degrees hotter than any other material—a huge increase over the current record.

Last December a paper was posted to arXiv, physicists were cautious about the work. The history of superconductivity is littered with dubious claims of high-temperature activity that later turn out to be impossible to reproduce. But in the months since then, Eremets and co have worked hard to conjure up the final pieces of conclusive evidence. A few weeks ago, their paper was finally published in the peer reviewed journal Nature, giving it the rubber stamp of respectability that mainstream physics requires. Suddenly, superconductivity is back in the headlines.

Larry Guth and Nets Katz received research awards, from the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI), for their solution of the Erdős distance problem and for other joint and separate contributions to combinatorial incidence geometry. Their work is an important contribution to the understanding of the interplay between combinatorics and geometry.

Maria-Magdalena Boureanu, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Craiova, Romania [url01], gave a talk with the title “On some nonlinear problems with generalized operators and variable exponents“.Abstract: We are concerned with existence, uniqueness, or multiplicity results for boundary value problems that arise in the framework of the spaces with variable exponent. More exactly, we investigate problems involving nonhomogeneous differential operators that can be particularized to both Laplace-type operators and mean curvature-type operators. Naturally, the study of a problem must be conducted in the appropriate space, and, since we intend to approach various problems with different conditions on the boundary, we will consider several Sobolev-type spaces, including the case where the exponent is anisotropic.